"Murray Leinster - Space Platform" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

continued as the norm of life on Earth.
And there were the people who were actually doing the building.
Joe rode a bus into Bootstrap that night with some of them. The middle shift, two to ten o'clock was off.
Fleets of busses rolled out from the small town twenty miles away, their headlights making a procession
of paired flames hi the darkness. They rolled into the unloading
area and disgorged the late shift, ten to six, to be processed by Security and admitted to the Shed. Then,
quite empty, the busses went trundling around to where Joe waited with the released shift milling around
him.
The busses stopped and opened their doors. The waiting men stormed in, shoving zestfully, calling to each
other, scrambling for seats or merely letting themselves be pushed on board.
The bus Joe found himself on was jammed hi seconds. He held on to a strap and didn't notice; he was
absorbed in rapt contemplation of his idea for the repair of the pilot gyros. The motors could be replaced
easily enough. The foundation of his first despair had been that everything could be handled but the most
importantтАФthe all-important absolute accuracy of the gyros' balance. That, it had seemed, couldn't be
reachieved. Securing it at the plant had consumed four months of time. Each of the gyros was four feet in
diameter and weighed five hundred pounds. Each spun at 40,000 revolutions per minute. They'd had to be
machined from a special steep to assure that they wouldn't fly apart from sheer centrifugal force. Each was
plated with irridium lest a speck of rust form and throw it off balance. If the shaft and bearings were not
centered exactly at the center of gravity of the rotors, five hundred pounds of steel at 40,000 r.p.m. could
raise the devil! They could literally wreck the Platform itself. And "exactly at the center of gravity" meant
exactly. There could be no error by which the shaft was offcenter by the thousandth of an inch, or a ten-
thousandth. The accuracy had to be absolute!
Gloating over the solution he'd found, Joe could have hugged himself as he stood in the waiting bus.
Outside, he saw another bus start off with a grinding of gears and a spouting of exhaust fumes. It trundled
to the highway and rolled away. Another and another followed it. Joe's bus fell in line. They headed for
Bootstrap in a convoyтАФ a long, long strip of lighted vehicles running one behind the other.
It was dark outside. The Shed was alone, f&r security. It was twenty miles and more from the town where
its workforce slept and ate and made merry. That was security,
too. One shift came off, and went through a security check, and during that time the Shed was empty
except for the security officers who roamed it endlessly, looking for trouble. Sometimes they found it. The
shift coming on also passed through a security check. Nobody could get into the Shed without being
identified past question. The picture badge stage was long since passed in the Space Platform security
system. Security was tight!
The long procession of busses rolled through the night. Outside was dark desert, overhead were many
stars. Once, as the line of vehicles swayed and rumbled on, a tiny spark shot across the sky, with all the
velocity of a meteor. But it was one of the larger artificial satellites, a balloon of aluminum foil, inflated
by the vapor of an aromatic hydrocarbon and intended to test the possibilities of radio-reflection
techniques. It had been expected to stay aloft perhaps a year. Nobody any longer set a term to its probable
existence.
The men in the busses didn't know about its passage. They'd have been uninterested if they had. The air in
the busses smelled of sweat and oil and tobacco. Somebody still had garlic on his breath from lunch.
There was noise. An argument proceeded, two seats up the aisle. There was the rumble of the motor and
the peculiar sound of tires and voices all around. Men had to speak loudly to be heard above the din. There
was bedlam.
There was a swaying among the crowded figures, more pronounced than that caused by the motion of the
bus. Somebody was pushing his way from the back toward the front. The aisle was narrow. Joe clung to
his strap, thinking hard and happily about the rebalancing of the gyros. There could be no tolerance. It had
to be exact. There had to be no vibration at all...
Figures swayed away from him. A hand clasped onto his shoulder.
"Hiya."